1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns an attachment assembly for mounting electronic devices, especially for mounting hard disks drives.
2. Brief Description of the Background of the Invention Including Prior Art
Increased level of complexity of home electronic appliances, such as television set-top boxes, digital video recorders, home media servers, DVD players or personal computers, calls for a careful design of those appliances, taking into account many factors important for their proper operation.
An important issue is an assembly of disk drives, such as optical disk drives or hard disk drives, to provide their proper operating conditions. There are several aspects that should be taken into account, namely isolation of vibrations, protection from mechanical shocks and efficient cooling. The designs of mounting kits should be cost-effective both at manufacturing and assembly stages of a production process.
Modern disk drives operate at high rotational speeds, which cause vibrations of the drive. The vibrations, if not properly isolated, can be transferred to the housing of the appliance, which may result in a disturbing noise, highly undesirable by a user. Moreover, home appliances are often displaced, for example during house cleaning. If the displacement occurs during operation of the disk drive, and results in a mechanical shock to the device, the disk drive may function improperly or even become damaged. Furthermore, disk drives, especially modern, high-speed hard disk drives, emit large amounts of heat, which should be efficiently transferred away from the disk drive. Cooler disk drives run quieter and last longer than disk drives operating unprotected from overheating.
A known solution, published in a U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,714 patent, discloses a computer peripheral shock mount for limiting motion-induced errors. According to its specification a cradle rests in a mounting plate having a lower surface accommodating the lower surface of the cradle, a vertical wall on each side of its lower surface, and a flange extending outwardly from each wall.
In order to attenuate the magnitude of mechanical shocks and vibrations reaching the disk drive assembly, resilient means are provided for coupling the cradle member to the mounting plate in the form of rubber or plastic compressible vibration isolators, that, in the preferred embodiment, are spheroid shaped. They may be formed of any suitable material and may assume any appropriate shape that will serve as an effective shock absorber between the cradle and the mounting plate.
In this prior art, 2 cradles are needed, which makes the solution inefficient also in terms of cost. The drive is mounted using bottom mountings only and 2 cradles form a kind of suspension for the electronic device mounted in the assembly.
Additionally, according to the U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,714 disclosure, in order to prevent an undue motion of the cradle, relative to the mounting plate, in an up-and-down direction as well as in a back-and-forth direction along a line from the front of disk drive assembly to the back thereof, movement limiters are provided. Therefore there is no prevention of an undue motion in a side to side direction.
Drawbacks of the aforementioned prior art therefore include lack of sufficient cooling of a closed electronic equipment, expensiveness and insufficient attenuation of vibrations or shock caused along side-side axis.
Therefore, there is a need for a cost-effective attachment assembly of electronic devices, which would provide isolation of vibrations in all axes, protection from mechanical shocks that may occur in operating mode or during transportation, and would not limit the design of the casing, hence enabling a casing design allowing efficient cooling.